20 Underrated Movies From 2000 You've Probably Never Seen

Released: 25th December 2000 (US)

A kinky tale of history's most famous bondage-loving pornographer incarcerated in an insane asylum, Quills was not your average Oscar-bait period drama.

Maverick auteur Philip Kaufman's film is less a biopic of the real-life Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, (it was criticised for a lack of historical veracity) and more a provocative satirical story about sex, censorship and artistic freedom.

Quills imagines De Sade's final years smuggling his scandalous literature out of the asylum where his licentious lifestyle and work have seen him incarcerated by the Napoleonic authorities. He is assisted by the sympathetic priest in charge of the asylum and a laundry maid who resists his advances but is fascinated by his writing, and opposed by a puritanical psychiatrist with his own repressed depravities.

Although its origins as a stage play make this a fairly talky film, that doesn't mean that it stints on the profane sex, violence and sexual violence that made its protagonist a household name.

Stylish, vulgar and grandiosely melodramatic, Quills is a lush costume drama built around a fully committed central performance from Geoffrey Rush. Playing De Sade like a flamboyantly perverted rock star, rather than the ageing obese aristocrat of reality, Rush delights in a sinfully decadent lead role that scored him an Oscar nomination.